Trump Wades and Weighs In

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

We're back after quite a long hiatus, and Victor has taken his trips to Europe and is now back.

So, we're back.

And we've got a lot on the agenda.

This is the Friday news roundup.

So, we'll be looking at some of the events with Trump.

And

what else do we have?

Lots of Trump things, and then also the investigation into his assassination.

So, stay with us, and we'll be right back.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

So Victor, we've had a lot of things going on this week and I wanted to first ask you, Trump,

I would say, I don't know if I should label it brave, but he did go into the National Association of Black Journalists, and he went for an interview.

And of course, there was a lot of turmoil, and especially one of the interviewers, Rachel Scott from ABC, wanted to

say that Trump had said all these racist things, and what was he going to respond to that?

Although I thought that Harris Waulkner's asking him what his message was for the black community was a much more serious question.

But your thoughts on that interview?

It was a draw.

He should be congratulated that he went into

an audience that he knew would not be sympathetic.

Camilla Harris didn't even show up.

And by the way, she's not going to show up for anything like that.

Why didn't she show up for that?

She didn't show up for that because it was spontaneous.

Anything that is spontaneous and off

the teleprompter, unscripted, or among a group of journalists that are disinterested and real journalists, it's not going to work.

So the point is this,

that Donald Trump has 90 days left

and he's going to have to give all of these unscripted, and that's the way he is.

He's going to be blunt.

He's going to get points for going into places that no one else would go.

He's going to get points.

that contrast with the timidity and the reclusiveness that surrounds this Harris stealth candidacy, which is just like Joe Biden's.

He had a cognitive deficit, so we didn't see him in 2020.

She has a cognitive deficit, not due to enfeebleness, but just because she's incompetent and they're not going to let her out.

So he has to use all of these occasions in these 90 days.

It is an advantage that they selected her at the very end of the campaign season.

Otherwise, they would have had a whole year to expose her the way that George McGovern in 72 was exposed, the way that Michael Dekakis in 88 was exposed, the way that Jimmy Carter was exposed.

All of them were hard leftists that tried to run and reinvent themselves as moderate, acceptable mainstreamers.

And Richard Nixon and

George H.W.

Bush, really Lee Atwater and Ronald Reagan tore off that veneer, but they had time to do it.

Trump doesn't have time.

So when he goes in there, he has to make every minute.

So he was good to shake them up, and people were laughing at a lot of what he said, and the left-wing media went crazy.

But

he doesn't need to get into a discussion about the racial feides of Kamala Harris.

What he said was he didn't know that she was black until recently when she rediscovered herself as black.

That's true.

But it would have been better to say

If she's a DEI candidate, I'm the unity candidate.

I don't really care what a person's background is.

They can have all of the affected accents.

They can say that they're hyphenated.

I just care about all of you, all Americans.

Unity, unity, uni.

Let them be diversity.

I'm unity.

But he got into this tit-for-tat with this biased reporter who was trying in these awful

invective against him, was trying to paint him as a racist.

And you watched that and you thought, wow, she ambushed him.

So he's got to be above the fray.

But you look at the headlines, and it's not his fault.

But Trump calls

Harris not black.

Trump talks about race.

Trump talks about black jobs.

So when he said the illegal aliens are taking black jobs, and she said, What's a black job?

Well, he gave a good enough answer.

They're just people that happen to be black.

But what he should have said is they are dumping

millions of illegal aliens, and that's not an exaggeration with 10 million coming in in our large urban communities

of New York, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, and that's where the African-American community has higher population density.

So obviously, they're going to be the most affected.

That's all he had to say.

Which brings up another question.

He got off onto a tangent, and he's right about that, that Biden wasn't, here's what he has about four adjectives.

He's an utter disaster.

It was terrible.

He's horrible.

Yes, we know that.

But you've got 90 days to redefine Kamala Harris.

Joe Biden is not running.

And what's happening, Mr.

President, Mr.

Trump, is this, that as long as he was president and he was non compos mentes and he was selfish and he wouldn't step down and they lied about his cognitive decline and you'd beat his brains out literally in the the debate and he was snarly.

I call him a snaggle puss.

That's what what he does.

He wasn't just demented.

He was mean, semi-fascist,

you know, ultra-maga, fat, all that stuff.

He had no empathy.

Now he's crushed.

The conspiracy that kicked out all of the other primary people in 2020 and anointed him as their useful veneer came back to haunt him.

He lived by the conspiracy, he died by it.

They also removed him.

Not that the people didn't want him removed, but they removed him.

So he is inert.

And it doesn't matter to tell everybody that he's horrible, he's destroyed.

Because what's happening,

now that they got rid of him, Joe, the selfish bastard, excuse my language, is now George Washington farewell address.

He was very noble.

He was selfless.

He's not, he's in seclusion.

So there's going to be empathy developing for Biden as he fades away.

That's the way the left operates.

They destroy somebody, and and then after they destroy it, they said, I didn't mean to do it.

Sort of like Scipio levels Carthage.

Oh, I'm sorry.

And that's what they do.

So he's got to get off the Biden.

When he mentions the Biden administration, it can only be in one context.

She was a full partner in the border in 10 million illegal aliens that have caused this mayhem.

She once wanted to defund the police.

She's on record in 2020 as she was vying for the vice presidency to talk about the violent demonstrations would not stop.

She helped bail out.

Go through all of that and then tag her with the mess abroad.

Three proxy wars over Taiwan, over Ukraine, over

Gaza and Iran and all of its circuits.

Do all of that.

But you don't need to talk about Biden anymore.

He's ancient history.

And remember, everybody, in this 90-day period, we've got this convention coming up.

It may be explosive with all the demonstrators, but it's still going to hog the entire news cycle.

We have the Olympics,

and we're going to have the debate.

We're not going to have a lot of time.

That's what they count on.

They do not want to talk about her record.

They do not want to talk about her as a Bay Area leftist.

They do not want to talk about all those things that,

you know, the news clips show or the video clips.

Defund the police.

I'm a radical.

I'm going to go make you, I'm going to make people turn in their assault weapons, semi-assault weapons, whatever you want to call them, mandate, buyback, all of these crazy things.

That's what you've got to do.

And you've got to say, she's going to do to the United States what she did to California.

And she had a role.

She was city attorney in San Francisco.

She was county attorney.

She was.

statewide officer, attorney general.

She wanted to ban fracking and horizontal drilling.

She got her way.

And she was a senator.

But you don't need to see that, get into her racial DNA and whether she is a DEI or not.

Everybody knows she was because he announced it.

He said he wanted a black person and preferably a woman.

But

if you're going to talk about, then talk about unity.

He could have said to Rachel Scott,

Your party is the one that's obsessed with race.

They're now talking about white dudes, white dudes.

Every group has to be identified.

I don't do that.

I don't care what her race is.

I care what her character and her politics are.

And I care about everybody in this room as Americans, not as a particular race.

And that's all he has to do.

But believe me, if they bait him and he goes down these cul-de-sacs each week about, oh, I killed Biden in the debate.

He's horrible.

He's destroyed everything.

Come on, Harris, the DI.

Oh,

she's not black.

It's going to be just what the left wants.

Yeah.

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I wanted to turn to the

judge Mishon

and his daughter and he's the judge of the Alvin Bragg case.

I hope I had got that right and he she has and her clients have raised $93 million

using the case as part of their solicitation.

And that's the latest news on the conflict between Mershon and the Confederate.

This is absurd.

This is absolutely absurd.

He would not revoke the

gag order.

Or none of them will.

So the more that he is hostile to Donald Trump and biased, the more that left-wing people in politics want to reward him.

They can't reward him, given he's a judge, but they can reward his daughter who's playing off that.

So the amount of business and dollar terms that she is generating has increased over 80%

from last year.

So all we need to say is, here's Judge Michon going after Trump in unfavorable rulings.

Here's his daughter.

This year, her business skyrockets because

of what?

All of these Democratic, wealthy politicos are using her.

and giving her business to get after Trump.

So Dan Goldman, one of the Goldman Sachs heirs, one of the big, he's given her over $50,000.

Adam Schiff, I think, has given her over $8 million.

Think of that.

The two most prominent Trump haters are deliberately steering their business to her as a way of rewarding her father to keep going.

And the idea that he doesn't know that, I have two children.

And if somebody is giving them a lot of business and helping them because he likes me, I know that.

And if somebody hates me and he's going after them, I know that.

This is ridiculous.

He should be

recused from the long ago.

And, you know, I'll say another thing.

Trump said, you know, I beat the Florida case.

He delayed it.

But these people are crazy.

And

everybody says Alvin Bragg won't dare do this or that or Judge Murshawn.

Don't count on it.

They have the wind at their back, they think.

I don't think they do.

I think, as I said earlier in a couple of columns, I think that the model, as James Pearson pointed out, is Dukakis.

17 points ahead in July of 1988,

unleashed Lee Outwater, Boston Harbor ad, Tank ad, Willie Horton ad, a bunch of other ads, using his own words.

And he was a much nicer, much smarter, much nicer person,

kinder person than Kamala Harris, much more sympathetic.

And they literally destroyed that candidacy, just as they destroyed the McGovern candidacy, just as Ronald Reagan destroyed the Carter candidacy.

It came very late.

It didn't happen in July.

It came in September.

So Trump has time.

But that's what he's got to do.

And he's got to go after, he's got to say, you know what?

I don't know if I'm in the clear or not.

These people want to destroy me.

So when they call him a felon, or they say, you're, you're, he said, that reflects on you, not me.

I haven't done anything wrong.

What you're doing is weaponizing the DOJ, and that's not going to happen on me.

I'm not going to go after you people.

I have the higher ground, but I am going to get rid of all the partisans so that this doesn't happen to anybody besides me from now on.

And so

he has the high ground.

He's like Gulliver and they're Liliputians, and they're trying to rope him down and get him in these time-wasting dead ends.

Is she Indian?

Is she black?

Did she have an affair with Willie Brown or not?

Ooh, look at this picture with her breasts bulging with Montel William.

Who cares?

Nobody cares.

Does anybody think that Stormy Daniels destroyed Trump?

No.

He got over that.

Access Hollywood.

And

this is what they're trying to do, and he's got to resist it.

And I hope that he has a Lee Atwater.

I hope that the Republicans have learned something.

They haven't won the

51% since 1988.

Rest in peace, Lee Atwater.

And they haven't, they've lost seven out of the last eight popular votes.

Trump lost it in 2020.

He lost it in 2016.

Romney lost it in 2012.

McCain lost it in 2008.

George Bush squeaked by in 2004.

That's the one.

George Bush lost it in 2000.

George H.W.

Bush lost it in

80.

He lost it in 2000.

92?

Yes, he lost it in 96 on his re-election.

And he,

excuse me, Bob Dole lost it in 96.

George H.W.

lost it in 92.

And the last time was 88.

So think of that.

Going back to 1988, they've only won two popular votes and the seven out of the last eight they lost.

And there's a reason for that.

It was that aristocratic,

we will suffer to lose nobly rather than to win ugly.

And I don't mean win ugly by calling people names.

I mean win ugly by some of the commercials that for the first time in my lifetime since

Lee Outwater, they're starting to produce some good commercials.

And they show Camilla Harris what she said and how ridiculous she is.

When she says, think of this woman, she says that you can't use the word radical Islamic terrorism.

So you should ask himself, the people who blew us up on 9-11, were they radical?

Yes.

Were they Islamic?

Yes.

Were they terrorist?

Yes.

Why not say it?

But then she will tell us that her pronouns are she and her.

And that's what you have to keep.

driving at, that she's a hardcore leftist.

And you don't, in the modern era, elect people from California in general, given the disaster that they wrought, and the Bay Area in particular.

That's the locus classicus of hard left out of touch politics.

And yet they nominated somebody from there.

They, in theory, have created a horrific blunder.

They took an inept candidate from the worst possible geographical area and they selected her without any opposition.

She's never once entered a primary in her entire life, much less did she ever win one.

She's never won a single delegate until now.

So she's vulnerable, but my gosh, when they give you a gift, use it.

Don't play into their hands.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about the investigation on the assassination attempt.

Stay with us, and we'll be back for them.

We're back, and this is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show, and you can find Victor at victorhanson.com.

The website is called The Blade of Perseus, and everything that Victor does, more or less, goes on there.

And so, lots of stuff to read.

And please come join us with a subscription at $5 a month or $50 a year.

Victor, so the investigation on the assassination attempt of Donald Trump has been bringing up all sorts of things recently.

And I'll just explain the last few things that I've noticed: that they have been arguing over why the building that the assassin was on was outside of the Secret Service-identified perimeter.

That

there seems to be a conflict between the local law enforcement and the Secret Service.

And just recently, we've had a video come out where it looks like, and nobody's confirmed this, that the

assassin was moving across the top of a building and an onlooker caught him on his phone while he was videotaping Donald Trump.

So those were the three things this week.

Well, you had the former Secret Service person resign in disgrace, and then we have her replacement.

And he took a completely different tact.

Rather than sit there and take the blows that she deserved and kind of smile and obfuscate, he was cranky and and snarled back.

It didn't work.

He can't explain the inexplicable.

And that is, did the Trump team say

there's too many threats, he's too vulnerable, we need Secret Service additional?

And did they say no?

Yes.

Did they coordinate with local law enforcement?

They are the primary protective service, not local law enforcement.

So when they blame local law enforcement and said, wow, that was out of our permit.

That is absolutely crazy because that roof had the best direct shot.

When you look at that roof from Trump, I mean,

I haven't shot a high-powered rifle in 20 years.

I could shoot a target at that.

That is just disgraceful.

And he should have said something.

And then he said, well, I'm not going to rush to judgment and ruin people's careers.

He should have said,

Somebody's culpable.

It may be me, it may be some of my subordinates, but I guarantee you, somebody is going to pay for this.

And it may be the policy of people like me that crafted it.

And apparently he has a direct role in it as a subordinate to Kimberly.

So

the other thing is that old adage, don't try to make a conspiracy when it's incompetence.

But I tell you, I think we're coming to a conclusion.

And the more you listen to these stories about it was too hot to go outside, or we didn't have control, or we weren't on the same bandwidth, or our drone didn't work, but his did, the more you get the impression there was a laxity, almost a deliberate laxity, like as if the Secret Service was saying, oh my,

we got to go protect that crazy Trump and those crazy MAGA people, and they all scream.

And in other words, it was sort of like the Peter struck Lisa Page.

Remember that correspondence, which they got $2 million from, apparently now, suing the government.

And they said, oh, we'll fix it.

Oh, I went to Walmart.

You could smell the MAGA people.

Remember all that?

Well, that's their attitude.

So they didn't take it seriously.

And they don't take it seriously today.

And,

you know,

again, there's two messages that all of the unhinged people out there are getting.

If you shoot and hit Donald Trump, there's a lot of people online in which young people habituate

that like that.

And there's nobody in the adult world of the left that will say, how dare you ever mention him as Hitler?

No, they all say Hitler.

So if he's Hitler, then Hitler should be gone.

That's number one.

And two, if a 20-year-old incompetent can do it,

well, then somebody 35, you know, that has better

marksman skills thinks, I can do it.

So that's where we are right now.

And I guarantee you, there's going to be some nut that comes out of the woodwork and has convinced himself that he's going to be heroic on the left for killing Hitler or trying to.

And he's going to be convinced that the Secret Service is not serious.

And that's going to be,

you know, and Trump said the other day, he's going to go back to Butler.

So just think about that.

And after listening to the two top Secret Service, they don't take it seriously.

They really don't.

And either approach, whether you're going to just take the blows and kind of stonewall or you're going to be snarly and fight, it didn't work.

They can't answer the question because the questions aren't answerable.

The only answer to the questions are, we screwed up.

It can't happen again.

If it happens again, somebody's going to get killed.

The Secret Service has to take over an area and it has to control every aspect.

of danger.

And then we have to coordinate minutely, every minute, with local law enforcement and with the FBI.

And we need background checks.

We need to do this.

And we didn't do it.

And somebody didn't do it.

And we're either going to fire them or we're going to make them do it.

But he didn't say that.

No.

So it just sows and fertilizes more conspiracy theory.

Yeah.

What did you make of Christopher Wray once again popping up in this testimony and saying Trump was hit by shrapnel?

I know that's...

Well, look, Christopher Wray created a, he was was number third in the FBI, and they got rid of Comey that no one liked and was a rank partisan.

And then they got rid of McCabe, who had lied on four occasions to federal investigators and should have been in prison by now, right?

Lying.

If you or I lied to a federal investigator, say about our taxes, we'd be in big trouble.

So he was the third.

And then I can mention Robert Mueller, who good old Bob Mueller, the so-called professional, went under oath to Devon Nunes' House Select Committee on Intelligence.

And what did he do?

He said he had no idea what Fuse and GPS was, and he had no idea what the dossier was.

Those were the twin catalysts for his own investigation.

So he was lying, or he was demented.

So this is the fourth person, and everybody thought, he's apolitical.

Look at him.

He's just, he looks like an FBI, nonpartisan, Ephraim Zimbabwe Jr.

No.

No sooner was he in there than he was going after parents at school boards because the teachers' unions called up the DOJ.

No sooner did he go in there and they were doing performance art FBI SWAT raids at Roger Stone's house, tipping off the CNN and going after abortion critics and going into Mar-Lago armed with a SWAT team.

and going through Melania's underwear drawer and then rearranging files on the ground and messing them up to show that

Donald Trump didn't have adequate security.

They did that.

They staged those pictures.

And then when he was held to account, he said, Christopher Ray said, I got to go.

And he got on his private FBI R jet and flew to his vacation home and ended the testimonies.

So when he said,

well,

We don't know what hit his ear.

It could have been a fragment of a bullet.

It could have been a bullet.

It could have been some piece of glass.

What he was basically saying

was that Donald Trump was not shot intentionally by an assassin.

That's a whole lie.

And then he's the real truth, he killed another person and wounded two, and he shot eight times.

And he probably wasn't shooting a Trump.

He just kind of shoot and ricocheted and hit the dais and blast, and that's probably just as likely.

That was a lie.

Yes.

He should be fired for that.

He really should.

If you have an FBI director and you have pictures in the New York Times where they show the bullet trajectory going right at him.

And you can see the bullet in mid-air.

And he says that the shot that hit his ear and wounded him, his ear,

half an inch from his brain, could have been a fragment and it could have been glass.

And he comes not prepared to say that.

He can't tell us.

And why would he say that?

It doesn't make any sense.

Unless you want to downplay

the idea that Donald Trump was almost shot.

So what the left is trying to do is people on the right say he was shot in the head.

Technically correct.

The ear is part of the head.

But they think misleading because the head is a fatal shot and the ear is not.

In other words.

And so what he's doing is weighing in on that controversy, whether he knows it or not.

He's downplaying the severity and the actual danger, but

he doesn't give the picture, which is the true picture, that a shooter was trying to blow the head off the president and would have no thanks to the Secret Service, the FBI, or local law enforcement, had he not turned at the last moment and got shot in the ear.

And he can't say that for some reason.

Yeah.

Christopher Ray is not a...

He knows that if Donald Trump were to be elected, he would be fired on January 20th.

As well, he should have have been a long time ago.

Yes, but he will be fired.

Yes.

They all know that.

They all know that.

You've got 20,000 people in the IRS, the DOJ, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the FBI that have been at the trough for years

through

the Obama administration, the Trump administration, the Biden administration, and they're partisan.

and they're complacent and they have nothing but contempt for elected officials.

They think, well, they come in and they go.

and they don't know how the bureaucracy works.

And I stay here with my little fief them.

And

what's going to happen to them is if Trump gets elected, they know what he's going to do because he said he's going to do.

He's going to try to fire them, the ones that are culpable.

And they're going to do everything they can from now until the election to stop that.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and go to another break and then come back and talk a little bit about Trump and Netanyahu and Trump and Vance.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

So Victor, I don't know if you have any comments on this, but Trump did meet with Netanyahu

after he did his joint,

the statement to the joint Congress.

And I was wondering if you have any feeling of the meeting at Mar-a-Lago between Trump and Netanyahu.

Well, I think they're trying to

mend fences because they had a falling out over two, apparently two issues.

When Trump decided to take out Soleimani,

he felt that the Israelis were not on board, either taking co-credit for it or saying they provided intelligence, which they probably did.

And the second,

this is kind of poor Isle, but Biden,

Netanyahu called up Biden.

Donald Trump knows that when Biden took over, he had the entire resupply pipeline under his control with his hand on the valve.

And had he not called up Biden or had Netanyahu, who

shown any modicum of resistance to Biden, they would have you know what these guys do.

They would have cut him off.

I mean, think about it right now.

Donald Trump was impeached for a phone call to Zelensky when he said, congressionally approved aid, which I added offensive weapons, which they were afraid to give you.

I got to hold up until you tell me that Victor Slokin wasn't fired because he was looking into this crooked Biden family.

Stop.

Donald Trump knows that even though Biden has not been nominated, that he will be the nominee, and therefore he was using

federally approved, congressionally approved aid to further his ambitions next year as a presidential candidate.

Okay, don't.

Joe Biden took 3,500 bombs and he held them up and he said, I'm not giving them to Israel.

Not going to give them to Israel until you show more compassion for the Palestinian people and have a ceasefire, basically.

And that was entirely because of 250,000 voters in his

presidential aspirations in Michigan.

If anybody had

filed articles of impeachment, they would have said, oh, how dare you do that?

And that's where we are in this country.

And it's going to be very, very hard to go back to the center.

And

I'm glad that he talked to Netanyahu.

Netanyahu, we're going to talk that in another broadcast coming up tomorrow or today,

that they took out three people in three capitals, Beirut, Damascus, and Tehran.

And they couldn't have done it, let's be frank, unless somebody in these terrorist appendages of of Tehran called them up or works with them and says, I think one of them was blown up in his bed.

And that wouldn't have been possible unless somebody was working with the Israelis, which tells you these people are not popular.

And the reason that they haven't hit Netanyahu and they're trying to hit Netanyahu is because the Israelis around him are loyal to him, and they're not going to leak where he is.

But in all of these places, these people thought that they were absolutely safe, And they weren't just in apartments.

They were in secure locations.

And they had ventured out of their lairs, some gutter, or other places where they're safe.

And

we'll see what happens.

But my gosh, that gives a message to Khomeini and to Nasrallah, that any minute, any second that they want to take them out, they can.

Yeah.

Well, let's turn to Trump and Vance and his choice.

I know you and Jack talked about the choice of Vance as a vice president and some of the value of that.

But this week they were trying to suggest that Trump and Vance were the weird choice.

And it is very strange for anybody who knows a little bit about Vance, who seems to be the uber normal of normal people, to go, what are they talking about?

But I was wondering if you had any thoughts on that strange campaign effort by the Democrats.

You know, it's just like it's right out of George Orwell where the party line, or it's right out of Pravda and the Soviet Union.

So what the DNC does, they get these little nerds in a room and they think up today, what is the thing?

What is the party line today?

It's that they're weird.

And then they send it out on email and text, and Jory reads, they're weird.

And then Scarborough, they're weird.

Aren't they weird?

I think they're weird.

And they go add nausea.

And as people point out, what's weird is

the Surgeon General.

What's weird is Sam Bankman or whatever?

What was his name?

Sam.

I know you're talking about the suitcase

and cross-dressing.

He's weird.

The male that exposed his breasts at the White House party is weird.

They're weird.

All of them are weird.

When Camilla Harris, there's a clip where she's dancing with a seven-foot-tall transgender man in the dress.

That's weird.

And so that, and then the next day it was, Donald Trump is old.

Donald Trump is old.

Donald Trump is old.

He looks very weary.

He's old.

He's old.

And that's what they do.

Last three days early, it was a racist.

He's a racist.

He's a racist.

He's a racist.

He's a racist.

And they just, they do that.

It's really scary how they operate in this group think like a Borg, you know, that they're all, they don't have any independent will.

They just all follow this party line.

And this is supposed to be the party of intellectuals and free thinkers and literary and artistic people.

They're not.

No.

It reminds me so much of academia.

I came out of this farm

and I grew up and there was a big pipeline.

It's a

50, I think it's over 48 inches.

And it has a big riser coming out of the ground.

We call them standpipes.

And every Saturday the farmers would congregate because that's where they turned the laterals on.

So it was a communal ditch under the ground.

And it was wild, man.

I used to go down there and I'd hide, hide.

I'd crawl into the vines.

I was like six and seven.

And then I'd creep up and there'd all these farming.

My grandfather was this old Roman kind of Cato guy, very polite, very kind of, he was in his 70s.

He was, they all called him Mr.

Davis.

They'd always say, has anybody ever heard

Rhys Davis swear?

And one guy would say, I heard him say hell once and he apologized.

And when he died, my duty was to go to all the businesses and make sure that he hadn't paid him twice because he paid everybody in cash.

He felt that he'd go to the bank, not to hide it, he would go to the bank and have records of it.

He just and he shook his hand and said, I'm Mr.

Davis, I want to pay you this.

Well, my point is, it was wild.

They would say, Ah, yeah,

you stole that stuff, or

Nixon's my guy, or Kennedy's a comic.

You know what I mean?

It was just wild.

That's what I grew up with.

I go to academia.

You see Santa Cruz?

I thought, wow, this is going to be really weird.

Free thinking people.

So it's 1972,

my start of my second year, and it's McGovern.

McGovern's a saint.

McGovern's going to win.

You got to get your parents.

And I just remember saying to my dorm, I don't think he's going to win.

He's too crazy.

I like him, the idea that he was a B-24 pilot.

He was a brave man.

He's a nice person.

But he's not going to win.

What?

What?

It was just groupthink.

And yet they were all with long hair.

They had no shoes on.

They had petouli oil perfume or whatever you called it.

They didn't bathe.

They were stoned.

They were stoned.

They fornicated in the showers when you went in to go to the bathroom.

You name it.

UC Santa Cruz 1972 was a circus, a Petronian satiricon.

And it was, yet it was all groupthink.

There was narrow a diverse idea.

And here were all these supposedly right-wing farmers, and they were screaming and yelling about politics and local politics and national politics, disagreeing with each other.

And it was just wild.

And that's what I grew up with.

And then I went to Stanford, the same thing.

The same thing in graduate school.

And that's what the left is.

They just groupthink, and they don't allow any dissenting voice.

And

it just boggles the mind.

It does.

They seem to have that

contempt for their constituency as though they're completely stupid and they can't see through it.

Or maybe you and I just watch too much news.

I don't know.

I had a good talk.

I have a research aide.

I'm guilty of one thing.

I try to hire classics PhDs

because of their fluency in language.

So I just hired a young woman, Hunter Morgan.

She's brilliant.

And so she was fact-checking an article on Athenian and American democracy I wrote.

She pointed out a good point

that

radical leftists

embody two different approaches.

One is they do everything in the world to get the people more power.

Go after the filibuster.

Bring in new states to get new senators.

Get rid of the Electoral College so that they can turn a constitutional republic into 51%.

Their ultimate dream is everybody sits at home with a computer and you push a button.

Execute Donald Trump.

Yes.

And that's what they do.

It's like the French Revolution, the Jacobins.

Okay.

But she had a good other point that they also love experts that are authoritarian, who do it for the people.

Oh, don't make fun of Jim Comey.

Anthony Fauci.

I have a bobble toy of Anthony Fauci.

He locked down

the whole economy and got basically was responsible for Trump losing.

He convinced him to do that.

But they love the expert.

And the expert has always got this noblise oblige attitude.

You people are stupid.

I'm John Kerry.

I need to use my jet because I can get around faster spewing my carbon footprint to save you, but you can't.

Or I'm the head of the teachers union, and I know that mediocre teachers are good, and mediocre classes are good for you, but my kids are in private academies.

That's how they think.

And so it's kind of hard to think, and Morgan really pointed that out, it's very hard to see

how they work because they want unlimited power, but they like these demagoguic experts, and they always appeal to the argument by title and expertise.

You know, settle science.

This is misinformation.

How dare you question the idea that a pangolin bat, you know, all the experts say otherwise.

Donald Trump, we have a professor who did a study and showed that Donald Trump is a racist, that kind of stuff.

Yeah, and their experts seem increasingly unable to communicate anything with the

people and to say empty things, which is why I think Kamala thought that she could get up and have all these empty things she said, and everybody would think she was brilliant, right?

They're training us to be empty talkers.

There's two catalysts for that.

And you're right.

As soon as she does a, if she's ambushed, like she's getting on a plane and some sympathetic journalism says, journalist says, you have a word about the border?

The border is important.

And I took it seriously because it's a serious border.

And she gesticulates with her hands.

She smiles and flirts.

And you want to say, Kamala, you're 56.

This doesn't work anymore.

You're a mother.

You're middle-aged.

This is what you did when you were 20s.

I mean, I don't want Donald Trump to say this.

But as an outside commentator, I can.

So you get the idea that she batted her eyelashes.

This is very sexist, by the way, but that's what she did.

And she attached herself to males, and then she said inane things and flirted around.

That's one thing.

And the other is, let's be frank,

when Donald Trump got into that DEI thing, she, when Joe Biden put himself in a box after George Floyd and the streets were on fire and everybody was saying DEI, DEI, D, woke, woke, woke, woke.

He said, I'm going to

appoint a black person.

And then they said, it's better be a woman.

And then he looked around and he thought, black women, hmm,

there's not really, there's the senator from Chicago, but there's only Kamala Harris.

And then there's Stacey Abrams, but she's an election denialist and a risque novelist.

And

I don't know.

There's no other black women that are senior politicians.

Maybe Susan Rice never elected anything.

So

Kamala Harris was a beneficiary of that.

And so she thinks that she does not, and this is a problem with DI, not the DI in particular or only DI, but it's the same thing about the Soviet Union in the 20s and 30s and all the way up to the 80s.

If you judge somebody on your ideology, then they're going to take advantage of that.

They're not going to work.

They're not going to bone up on anything.

Hitler's inner circle, he had the most incompetent people in the world.

I mean, they were just the only evil genius was really Goebbels.

Goring was a buffoon.

Halder was a buffoon.

I mean, Keitel was a boo.

They were all buffoons.

I know.

Goebbels was a buffoon in some ways.

No, I mean, he was an evil genius.

Himmler was a chicken farmer.

Not that I like chicken farmers, but I mean, he...

Alfred Rosenberg was an idiot.

But they all had one thing.

They were yes men and they were ideologically correct.

And so when you saw Claudine Gay and those presidents, they were dear in the headlights, like, wait a minute, I've got to where I am because I'm woke.

And you're asking me to be competent and to say something that makes sense.

Why do I have to do that?

I've never done that in my life.

And that's what she's doing now.

And she's been a beneficiary of all of the modern trends in our society.

And it's very ironic that, you know, we have Willie Brown now writing things, still writing things about why she's Christ-like and why she should be given this and given this.

And he created her.

He created her.

She'd flunked the bar in California.

She had trouble.

I mean, she wasn't a star law student.

And he created her as city and county attorney of San Francisco.

And when she got there, she rewarded his donors.

It's all been documented.

And so...

I'm not suggesting anything is wrong with that.

I'm just saying that that is why that when she has to speak extemporaneously, she says things like, we all love school buses.

But she doesn't just say, we all love school buses.

She tosses her head.

She cackles.

She just

gesticulates with her hands.

She winks.

She does all of this.

And this is very funny because the left used to go after Sarah Palin.

They said, she's just...

She's just a good-looking woman that flirts and she winks.

She winks at you.

She's flirting with you because she doesn't can't come up.

Remember all that?

Yes.

Sarah Palin was a lot more accomplished

and came from a much tougher background than did Kamala Harris, who was the daughter of two PhDs.

So

yeah, that's why

she's never been in a cauldron.

By the way, she's never had an antithetical or oppositional audience.

She cut her teeth in the Bay Area, pandering to Bay Area people.

Then she ran for state attorney general in a left-wing, the most left-wing state, almost lost.

Then she was a senator.

Then she tried to out-demagogue all of the other socialists in the 2020, I can't say primaries because she quit before the primaries, but the preliminary primaries where she was trying to call Joe Biden a racist and all of that.

And then people said, this woman is in it.

We don't want her.

And she dropped out yeah and so she's never had an adversarial question or as vice president they just thought i mean they were trying to sabotage her let's be frank they were afraid that she might run or the vice president they didn't know what to do with her he couldn't get rid of her so the the rule came out she's joe biden's spiro agnew

what he didn't realize that

Biden was beyond repair.

So even though she was his spiro agno, she at some point in the future would be more advantageous to them than he would, given his geometric rate of decline.

Yeah.

And the way you talk about Kamala, I get the feeling that you don't think her tacking back to the center like Hillary did is going to be very,

she's not going to be able to do it.

She just will not.

She has some advantages.

I pointed them out on a podcast.

I wrote an article.

I wrote a tweet about it.

She's not under examination for nine months to two years.

True.

She was vice president of, quote-unquote, above politics in a left-wing administration.

Donald Trump only has 90 days to play those clips and to pin her down.

And there's not going to be one journalist that's going to help him because they're all in the tank for her, this Kamala rage.

So she's got a lot of advantage.

She's going to raise a lot more money than Trump.

And so she's going to sit in her proverbial basement like Biden and outsource her campaign to Silicon Valley and Wall Street money, and they're going to run ad after ad, and then she's going to count on 70%

of the voters in 10 to 12 swing states not showing up on Election Day, i.e., they already voted.

Early voting starts pretty soon.

And that's what she's counting on.

However,

if

they follow, as I said before, the pattern with McGovern, the pattern with Dukakis, the pattern with Carter

that George H.W.

Bush, Reagan, and Nixon did, they still have time.

Dukakis, as I said, on August 1st,

exactly at this point in 1980, had a 17-point lead.

Her lead will go up after the Democratic Convention, unless it's like 1968,

where Hubert Humphrey could never get over it because it was a total riot.

And everybody says that to me.

Oh, you know,

they're going to go crazy.

They're going to go crazy.

They're going to destroy Chicago.

And I thought, no, I don't think so.

Go back and read the February 2021 essay about how they stopped Donald Trump by Molly Ball.

She said they coordinated the street demonstrations.

She called it a cabal.

She called it a conspiracy.

And basically the message was they used big money and street people.

All of these supposed pure revolutionaries like Antifa and Bion, they all got bought off.

And they were completely on the control of the left.

And so I have a feeling that there's going to be some loud protesters, but they're not.

And then you know what she's going to do?

She's going to send the message to all of them.

I'm not Joe Biden.

I'm pro-Amos and pro-Palestinian.

But I can't say it right now.

But as soon as I'm elected,

you're going to get the most anti-Israeli present in history.

That's the message she's already sending.

And

so,

I don't know, we'll see, but

he's got to redefine her.

And

you're right in the sense that

Joe Biden was good old Joe from Scranton, who was in Delaware, which is kind of a purple state, at least it used to be.

So he had to say things that were centrist or conservative now and then.

She never did.

And again, as I said, she didn't just say that she was for the Green New Deal or that she wanted to have reparations or she wanted to outlaw private health care or she wanted to force people with AR-15s to sell

their weapons to the government.

She said it emphatically, as if to show that I got to be very careful because Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and Spartacus and Julian Costrow and Pete Budget are all for this, so I'm going to outdo them.

And that's what she did.

And so she's on record emphatically.

But again, you're going to have to roll that tape non-stop 24-7.

You got to get Trump

on the message.

She is a San Francisco leftist that helped destroy California.

She's going to do to the United States what she did to California.

Here's what she wants.

Here is the Biden-Harris record.

Here is my record.

Here's what I'm going to do.

Here's what she's going to do.

End of story.

You don't really care.

Let people like us talk about Willie Brown or let people like us talk about her cackling or how she was selected, but not Donald Trump.

He doesn't have time.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, we're at the end of our show today, and I have one comment for you.

Great show.

And they gave you four stars, but what's with all the commercial breaks?

There seems to be more and more lately, I guess.

We're going to have to do something about those commercial breaks.

I don't know.

All I know is I feel guilty because

you've got to remember I had my last tour of my private tour company and that was 160 people.

I took to Normandy.

I got back and then almost immediately I went on the Hillsdale contractual speaking for 16, 17 days.

And then I got back and I had to go up to Northern California and then I had long COVID.

We didn't have,

they were all original content and it was a lot of work to pre-record 20 hours, you know.

But I felt that the audience wanted in that

month of July when I was stranded out in the Mediterranean with COVID.

I thought my job as a commentator is to say something about the assassination, about the removal of Biden, and the coronation.

People got angry for me using the word coronation.

But that's what it was.

That's exactly what it was.

It was the implementation of an office on someone through basically monarchical power or dictatorial power.

It doesn't matter that 80% wanted it to happen.

It would not have happened unless those donors stood up and said, I'm not going to give any more money unless you yank him out because he's going to lose and I'll have no influence from my buck.

That's what happened.

Yeah.

Well, you also have a big response to the Sabine Howard interview.

I hope so.

Not only that, but I noticed on Epic Times, they did a whole layout with him as well.

So they did videos so you can see the work that we did.

The tiny thing that helps that guy, I am very happy and proud of because he was very humble.

I think his native language was Italian.

He was born in the United States and he grew up in Italy, and he was on these monumental classical projects.

He reminded me of a stonecutter on the Parthenon Freeze.

You know, they would groom the hairs on the back of the head that you never see from the ground ground just because they wanted that professional.

He's a professional and he's perfectionist.

And if a stranger comes to him and said, you're going to spend your whole life doing that?

And what's the compensation?

And he should be famous because he's our,

I don't know, he's

our fideist.

He's in that Praxilites.

He's one of the great sculptors of our time.

He's in the realist school of classical sculpture.

And yet we have all of these fakers and charlatans that can't even draw or can't sculpt, and they're all in all of the galleries and they get all the contracts.

This man should be, if there's any justice in the world, he should be the head of the National Endowment for the Arts and he should have

his influence to ensure that government grants, if you believe in government grants for the arts, should go to people who know how to sculpt and love the country and are trying to create

a national monument.

And he's doing this on World War I that's it's gravely overlooked.

And it's brilliant what he's doing.

And I don't think any, I didn't, see, I'm not blaming.

I didn't know who he was.

I'd known of the project and I'd seen the name, but it didn't register.

But I thought that interview went well, and I hope it helps him to,

according to my station, that it helps people be aware of him.

I've talked to people since then,

a couple of people, and I said, if you ever, in your capacity as an administrator, have control over a project or a sculpture, you should look at him or his school, his following.

But,

you know, given the limitations of a man's life, and you given the time and energy he's put into these sculptures, you don't really have a large output.

It's not like Alexander Cowder getting a bunch of paper-miche or little,

strings and plastic and then putting it, setting it up out of a suitcase, as Thomas Wolfe described, and can't go home.

I think he called him Pinky Logan or something in that novel.

But the point is, that's not hard to do.

And everybody thinks it's art.

Victor, how do you, why would you judge that?

You don't know the effort of the modern artist.

Yeah, I do.

Piss Christ, I could do Piss Christ in 20 minutes.

I couldn't sculpt one hand hand on

his statuary if you gave me five years.

That's just a fact.

Yeah.

Well,

there was another comment that you missed.

Gian Bernini, who was a Renaissance sculptor, but that's okay.

It just reminded me that tomorrow, Saturday, we will have the episode

that will have our cultural element, and it's going to be Machiavelli.

Yes, we finished with the Inferno

and the Paradisio, the Purgatorio and Paradisio.

We can do The Prince.

Yes.

The Prince too.

We also wrote a

de Bello, a treatise on war, but

it's not quite what you think.

And I think everybody knows that The Prince is not just Machiavellian.

It's not just be cold-hearted and mean and cruel and accept human nature.

There's element - some of the argument within that short treatise is that if you don't do this, you're going to get a lot of people killed.

Yeah.

So it's more complex.

We'll see everybody tomorrow.

This is the end of the Victor Davis Hansen show.

Thank you for listening to us.

Thank you, everybody.

Much appreciated.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen.

We're signing off.

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